


one time out of a hundred

by thinksideways



Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Prompt Fill, Reincarnation, does it count as major character death if it's a reincarnation fic?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-29
Updated: 2016-03-29
Packaged: 2018-05-30 00:04:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,897
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6399613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thinksideways/pseuds/thinksideways
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>It’s not always the same. Some of it is. The names are the same, mostly, or some iteration thereof. There’s always something between them, but what that something is varies.</i><br/><i>A connection, that’s what it is. A thread, weaving them together, again and again.</i><br/> </p><p>Reincarnation AU where Hamilton and Burr keep meeting. And meeting. And meeting.</p>
            </blockquote>





	one time out of a hundred

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by this prompt: Burr&Hamilton, reincarnation, modern AU with flashbacks. Aaron met Alexander long before 1776. As a matter of fact, they keep meeting. Sometimes they meet others (not everyone reincarnates), more often not, but their meeting is constant for every lifetime. Twist: they are at least semi-aware of previous lives, and their souls are always the same, but their personalities and relationship differ. So they love, live, and die. And sometimes shoot each other dead. They try not to make habit of this.
> 
> I took a few liberties. And may have had a few glasses of wine.

Someone has to leave first. This is a very old story.

There is no other version of this story.

\--Richard Siken

 

It's starts again - for the first time, also for the hundredth - when both men join the same law firm in New York.

(It’s not always New York, but mostly it is. Whoever said you can never go home again is a liar. They come home again and again.)

A bright-eyed young man, dark hair tied back in a ponytail, shrugging off a coat that’s borderline ridiculous.

A quieter man, dark-skinned and astute, watching him with a mix of dread and awe.

Their eyes meet and something passes between them, and Burr wonders why it feels like they’ve met before, and why it scares him to look at the man. Why he looks at him and thinks of gunshots (and another word, close but not the same: _gutshot_ ).

But the thoughts are cast aside quick enough - they always are, in the beginning - because Hamilton’s upon him, shaking hands, talking with no end in sight until Burr manages to get a word in edgewise, introduces himself, which almost silences Hamilton.

“Aaron Burr…”  Hamilton says, thoughtfully, “that rings a bell.”

 

***

 

It’s not always the same. Some of it is. The names are the same, mostly, or some iteration thereof. There’s always _something_ between them, but what that _something_ is varies.

A connection, that’s what it is. A thread, weaving them together, again and again.

There’s always a phrase, almost like a password - _smile more_ \- said (always by Burr) with varying levels of affection, depending on the lifetime. It's a touchstone, something unchanged from life to life.

(In some lifetimes, they love each other. In some, they do better hating one another. In some they love each other until they don’t. Regardless, there’s always some kind of hideous intimacy between them, one way or another.)

There’s always a death – Hamilton’s - though Burr’s not always the cause. He’s grateful for this, in an absurd way. He always knows it’s coming without ever really knowing what _it_ is, only knows the slow buildup of dread in his stomach, rising until a day comes when Hamilton falls.

It’s always sudden.

A car crash, a fall, a robbery gone wrong. Sometimes it’s a war - never the revolution, never _their_ revolution, that death happens only once - but there are plenty of wars and they usually end up fighting in them.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Sometimes Burr’s the one who gets the call (the script varies: _I’m sorry to tell you this_ or _are you sitting down_ or _please come immediately,_ but it all means the same thing).  In those times, it managed not to go wrong – well, not entirely wrong at least. In those times, he can say goodbye. In those times, he is not the cause of death.

Sometimes Eliza’s the one who calls him (or writes him. It depends on the decade). Sometimes it’s John. Once it’s Thomas, and even though his stomach’s twisting at the news there’s an absurdity in that world that almost makes him laugh.

And yes, sometimes Burr’s the one who kills him.

He always knows him, first. It’s cruel, in that way.

 

***

 

Hamilton’s the one who buys Burr a drink, that night.

(It was his turn to ask, in this life.)

It’s almost always a drink.

“Smile more,” Burr tells Hamilton. He sees the man start like Burr had pinched him. He isn’t sure why he said it in the first place, it had sprung unbidden to his lips.

“Where did you hear that phrase?” Hamilton asks, placing his drink on the table.

“Why?”

“It’s just…it’s been said to me before.”

 _I know_ , thinks Burr, but he doesn’t push the issue.

 

***

 

Weehawken.

It is an ugly place for an ugly affair. The air feels heavy and greasy, as does the pistol in his hand. Van Ness lays a hand on his arm and Burr realizes he’s shaking.

For all their lifetimes, neither man ever returns to Weehawken. Or not to that spot. In one life, Burr looks out the car window at a small park and the train tracks beyond and shudders like a goose had walked over his grave.

 

***

 

They end up in Burr’s house, not drunk but not sober, either.

“I know you,” he says. His hand is on Hamilton’s knee and he doesn’t remember how it got there, but it’s warm and solid and he needs that, needs something to hold on to.

“How do I know you?” he continues. His hand is still on Hamilton’s knee. He needs to know. And the answer in his head can’t be true.

(Those who forget history are damned to repeat it.)

He’s not sure he’ll get a reply. Not sure if he’s alone in this. Whatever _this_ is.

Hamilton covers Burr’s hand with his own. Their fingers lace together like rope and for a moment Burr feels solid, grounded.

This is another touchstone - the way their hands fit. This always happens. It’s the same revelation but it’s always new to them.

“We’ve never met,” says Hamilton, but it sounds like a lie to both of them. It should be true. It _is_ true, but it isn’t.

“You knew my name,” he’s still trying to make sense of this but Hamilton is disorientating, like July heat.

“I’d heard it somewhere. You’re a popular man.”

Burr scoffs, and Hamilton kisses him.

They kiss like they’ve known each other forever _(they have),_ strong and insistent, eager. It doesn’t take long before they’re half-undressed and stumbling to the bedroom, hands everywhere. Hamilton’s mouth makes Burr forget all about the sound of gunshots.

The first time they fuck it’s always good. The second time is always better.

The first time is fast and desperate, like they know they’ve started the clock. Hamilton uses too much teeth but Burr doesn’t say anything because he kind of likes that it hurts, and besides, he’s a little inexperienced, is still too in awe that Hamilton’s sucking his dick to say anything negative. The first time they don’t use enough lube and have to stop and reset, clumsy, Hamilton laughing as he slicks Burr up again. Now it’s too much, but it makes it easier, and soon they forget all about it as they find a rhythm that feels made for them.

The second time - the time when they really get it right - Burr discovers Hamilton likes his hair pulled, and obliges, driving into him even as he pulls Hamilton’s head back. It’s rough and feral and Hamilton comes without being touched.

 

***

 

Dawn.

They stare at one another across the dueling grounds. They shake hands. It is the last time they’ll touch, in this life, but from then on Hamilton’s hands will always feel familiar.

 

***

 

The fiftieth time they fuck - or somewhere around there, they don’t keep track - the sex starts to get tender, too. Sometimes Burr collapses on top of Hamilton, going soft inside him, lays kisses on his collarbone.

It’s around this time that Burr wants to tell Hamilton he’s falling in love with him.

(It’s a lie. He’s already in love with him. He’s trying to ease Hamilton into it, or maybe ease himself into the idea he’s in love with a man so polarizing and difficult.)

Something stops him, though. Because when they say it, things accelerate - though he isn’t sure what things.

Another constant: they are never allowed enough time.

That night he dreams about Hamilton dying, wakes feeling hollowed out, but when he reaches across the bed Hamilton is there. He leaves his arm draped over him and feels his sides rise and fall, his soft snoring.

He stays like that most of the night and thinks to himself, _wait._

 

***

 

Guns drawn.

A hot day, and sweat-drenched men who have come to this, somehow - somewhere in the years amongst the fury and fighting (and fucking, they can’t forget that) they twisted, soured, curdled in the hot July sun.

Hamilton’s pistol catches the light as he lifts it up, and the bullet tears through the sky. Before it falls, Burr’s bullet has torn through him.

The word – **_wait_** – hangs in the air even as Hamilton crumples.

It comes to this because they are at once too alike and too different, magnets drawn to each other then flipped, repelled.

It comes to this because the end was messy, a wound too ragged and filthy to heal clean. It comes to this because they loved each other, once, until they didn’t - or maybe they did, until they grew apart and took an awful pleasure in ruining each other. The nuclear option of a relationship.

Or maybe it was nothing so grand – just a few remarks taken the wrong way, a childish refusal to apologize. A moment of action by a man who spent too many years waiting.

Burr can never save him. He doesn’t always want to.

 

***

 

“We keep meeting,” Hamilton mumbles against Burr’s shoulder, and Burr thinks it’s sleep-talk but when he looks back over his shoulder Hamilton’s eyes are open.

Burr says nothing, only raises an eyebrow, waiting.

“A cycle,” Hamilton’s still talking, still buried against Burr. Saying this thing they’ve danced around, refused to acknowledge because surely it’s ridiculous, surely they’re imagining things.

“I know,” Burr says, but truth is, he isn’t sure what he knows anymore. Sometimes he thinks he knows more about it then Hamilton (he’s the one who lives, after all), and sometimes he thinks it’s all in his head, some manifestation of anxiety and self-doubt, a way to ruin the relationship before they can even really get started. Self-sabotage.

Hamilton’s hand moves to Burr’s right hip, stops in between his hipbone and stomach. His fingers trace a circle and Burr aches, the past suddenly filling him up like bile.

“Right here,” Hamilton’s voice is almost a whisper.

“I didn’t--” Burr starts to say, but isn’t sure how to finish – _I didn’t mean to? I didn’t want to?_

He can’t remember what was going through his head at the time, or all the times that came after.

“There was the poetry,” says Hamilton, and laughs to himself, his own private joke that Burr almost remembers.

 

***

 

Once, they meet as children. It’s a summer friendship built on vast beaches and books leaps and bounds above their grade level. They hold hands to cross the street and something about it feels right to both of them.

Hamilton moves before school starts and Burr doesn’t think about him for years and years until one day he’s in a bookstore perusing and he picks up a book on the global debt crisis, authored by one Alexander Hamilton. The book’s easily 800 pages but Burr finds himself buying it out of curiosity.

The afterword of the book states the author died six months before publication and all edits were finalized by the late author’s wife, Eliza.

 

***

 

“I love you.”

Hamilton says it first. It’s done casually. They’re on the couch and Burr is watching one of the stupid political dramas he loves and Hamilton hates but watches with Burr anyway, a small indulgence even if his head is buried in a book or he’s on his laptop for the whole thing, breaking only to point out inconsistencies even though Burr would have been ready to swear he wasn’t paying attention _at all_ \--

But that’s not the point.

He doesn’t look at Burr. Burr almost missed it altogether. His eyes had been on the TV. Hamilton’s laptop is open on his lap and his face looks odd in the light. He’d stopped typing to say it. Burr moves the laptop, places it on the coffee table.

“I love you too.”

He takes Hamilton’s hand. He kisses him, deeper and slower than Hamilton usually allows. On the TV no one’s watching, the credits roll.

One time out of a hundred, they get it right.

 

***

 

In a place that isn’t Weehawken, they duel again.

(Maybe you can never go home, after all.)

It’s earlier, or maybe it’s later. Time’s a messy thing, scattering them this way and that, and in the end the time – the century – never matters.

This duel goes differently. They shoot each other. They end up in the same boat (literally, but also figuratively). Absurdly, Hamilton takes Burr’s hand. It’s sticky and Burr isn’t sure whose blood is whose, anymore. Their fingers lock ( _a touchstone_ ).

Hamilton dies first. He always does. Sometimes that’s a blessing for Burr, and sometimes it’s a curse.

Mostly a curse.

 

***

 

They fight. They always fight. The dissonance that always exists between them is wider – crueler – in some lifetimes than in others.

Sometimes they make up. Sometimes they are still in love. Sometimes they never loved each other at all.

 

***

 

“We’re fucking losing!” Hamilton yells, pacing around the room while Burr sits on the couch, legs drawn up beneath him so he won’t impede Hamilton’s rampage. Papers are everywhere. Hamilton knocks a pile off the bookcase and they flutter to the ground like snow. It will take hours to put them back in order.

“A cop shoots an unarmed black kid because he’s in the wrong fucking part of town, and we’re _losing_?!”

Burr’s raging himself, inside. They’re supposed to bring _justice,_ but the court’s a farce, corrupt, they’re swimming upstream.

“Alex, calm down,” he says. He knows it’s a mistake as soon as the words leave him mouth. Hamilton whirls, eyes ablaze. All these years – all these lives – and there are still so many things Burr forgets.

“I’m not going to fucking _calm down_ ,” – he spits the phrase like it’s filthy – “I’m going to fucking fix this.”

Burr sleeps on the couch that night. Hamilton doesn’t sleep at all.

The tension feels thick between them and Burr isn’t really sure why. Dread has begun to build in his stomach, an anxiety unrelated to the case, to Hamilton’s rage.

Somewhere a clock is ticking.

 

***

_Smile more_ , he tells Hamilton when they meet as soldiers in a war they’re damned to lose.

They weren’t together, that time. Not really. Just one shared kiss, hasty.

At the barracks Hamilton teaches Burr a phrase: _l’appel du vide_. The call of the void, the urge to jump from high places. Hamilton’s eyes are bright with fervor and fear when he says it, like it fits him a little too well, but Burr’s distracted by the way French sounds on his tongue.

In the end, Hamilton is just one more casualty in that war, a folded flag sent home. The void had come calling.

 

***

 

“That kid. It could have been you.”

Hamilton’s beside him on the couch. The storm that took him a few days ago has quieted, though Burr still senses the turmoil inside him.

“Could have been either of us,” Burr responds. Hamilton takes his hand, interlaces their fingers, bridges the gap between them.

“It’s fucked up,” Hamilton says, and Burr squeezes his hand. Small comforts.

“Everything’s fucked up,” Burr responds, which makes Hamilton laugh with a sound that’s a bit too close to a sob as he buries his face in Burr’s shoulder.

“I love you,” come the words, muffled against Burr’s shirt.

“I know. I love you too.”

Everything’s fucked up.

 

***

 

The first time he kills Hamilton, he thinks he’s haunted, after. He doesn’t believe in ghosts but sometimes books are knocked off his shelves, pens arranged differently, ink spilled across his desk like someone had been trying to write.

He visits a bust of Hamilton without really knowing why he does and when he sees those features, immortalized in stone, he feels like someone’s struck him. The bust doesn’t do him justice, of course (stone won’t ever capture the light in his eyes, that _fervor_ ) but it’s close enough, and even the crude rendition strikes him like an arrow.

“There was the poetry…” he murmurs to himself, and swears he hears someone scoffing.

When he turns, though, there’s no one there.

 

***

 

Burr is determined to change the narrative. To find the missing piece, whatever it is they need to break the cycle.

 _This time_ , he thinks. _This time_.

It is not the first time will think that, nor is it the last.

 

***

 

Burr’s at a party with a bright-eyed young woman before him. She’s smiling and her eyes are roving over him and he should like it - he _does_ like it - but he feels antsy, like he’s supposed to be somewhere else.

In this world - this life -  he’s a junior senator.

He’s distracted, not looking at the woman, instead looking around the room, _sure_ there’s something, someone. He knows about half the people at the party and has intentions to know all of them by the end of the night. But none of them quell the rising nerves in his stomach. None of them are _right_.

Somewhere a clock is ticking.

He sees a man with dark hair and for a moment his breath catches and he thinks _it’s him, it’s him_ , but the man turns and the excitement fades.

 _No_ , he thinks, _no, the eyes aren’t right_.

He turns back to resume conversation with the woman but she’s found a friend, is excusing herself from his admittedly sorry company. He’s smiling goodbye when he feels a hand tap his shoulder, polite but insistent.

“Pardon me,” says a voice that’s new and familiar all at once, “are you Aaron Burr, sir?”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to everyone who reads this because seriously, you make my life. If you would like to yell about Hamilton or just yell in general you can hmu on tumblr at thinksideways.tumblr.com


End file.
